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Humankind – Fugitive Slave Laws and Dred Scott

SEGMENT 1: In this documentary, we explore how federal courts enforced fugitive slave laws. Historians, actors and legal scholars re-create the famous case of a young escaped slave who was sent back by a Boston judge, provoking America’s largest abolitionist protest.

SEGMENT 2: Pulitzer Prize-winning Lincoln historian Eric Foner chronicles the Dred Scott decision (often derided as the Supreme Court’s worst ruling), which held that black people have “no rights” and helped set the stage for the bloody Civil War.

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